The present invention relates generally to continuous delivery (CD) systems for software development and, more particularly, to DevOps change tracking and management.
In general, DevOps is a software engineering practice that aims at unifying software development (Dev) and software operation (Ops), with the goal of shortening development cycles, increasing deployment frequency, and increasing dependability of releases. CD is a software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles to ensure that the software can be reliably released at any time. In general, the CD process makes the delivery of new applications and services more agile than the traditional approach where software developers and operations personnel belonged to separate teams. Traditionally, tracking all software changes required between software applications (e.g., for maintenance, troubleshooting and regulatory compliance) has been performed by humans via manual updates to a change and configuration management database (CCMDB) when managing Change Requests (CR) for all affected components.
Microservices architecture structures a software application as a collection of loosely coupled services. In microservices architecture, services are generally fine-grained and the protocols are lightweight. One benefit of decomposing an application into different smaller services is that it improves modularity and makes the application easier to understand, develop and test. Additionally, microservices architecture enables autonomous development teams to develop, deploy and scale their respective services (microservices) independently. In microservices architecture, each microservice (i.e., subsystem) can be used by different applications. For example, in a banking application, a Personal Information Microservice to manage personal information can be used by a credit card payment system and by an online trading application. Accordingly, any changes to the Personal Information Microservice will impact both the credit card payment system and the online trading application.